Last week we quoted a review that Carl Jung wrote of James Joyce’s Ulysses in which the psychologist called the labyrinthine modernist novel an “aesthetic discipline.” Jung’s phrase can describe equally the reader’s experience and Joyce’s own highly sophisticated artistry. The author himself produced a detailed schema of Ulysses’ structure for his friend Stuart Gilbert: in addition to primary fields of reference like human biology and color symbolism, Joyce connects each chapter to a particular “art”—theology, rhetoric, architecture, and medicine, to mention but a few. But for all this rigorous schematization of each episode, music spills out into every chapter and fully permeates the novel: advertising jingles, hymns, sonorous high oratory, sentimental ballads, brooding folk songs…. Joyce heard music everywhere.
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